Official Guide of the Railways
and Steam Navigation Lines of the United States, Porto Rico, Canada, Mexico, Cuba and Central America
PDF downloads
Promontory, Utah
Meeting point of the first transcontinental railroad © Matthew Shaw
The first edition of The Guide was published as Travelers Official Railway Guide of the United States, Mexico and Canada in June 1868. That was three years after the US Civil War had ended and the year before the first transcontinental railroad was completed.
The Guide is quite challenging to find your way around. Please read our "guide to the Guide" for some tips.
Timetable World has over 80 editions of the Official Guide of the Railways available to view online free-of-charge. Use the Timetable Search tool to find them.
Most of the same timetables are also available here to purchase as downloadable PDF files. A small number of items were scanned by Timetable World volunteers, but most were done by other individuals who are no longer trading and twenty were done by Google.
The PDFs offered here are new. Timetable World has generally tidied the scans and applied OCR to make them searchable. The raw unsearchable originals may be available elsewhere by hunting online.
Downloads £6 [GBP] each
The early timetables are under 500 pages
Downloads £10 [GBP] each
The later editions vary between 768 and 1801 pages (mean average: 1318 pages)
Some PDFs are larger than 1Gb. They are contained in 2-part ZIP files; both files should be downloaded to the same location, and opened via the .zip.001 file using a Zip extractor. 7-Zip is free to install.